Sinclair wildly over-paid all the stations (which seemed obvious at time). There is obviously a market for these rights but I suspect you need to bundle them up with streaming rights as well. Sportsnet up here has TV rights for the Flames but also streaming rights - so they get their money no matter how you watch it.
Most sports have bundled up their streaming rights in giant packages for the entire league. If you want to keep local revenue - you need to split it out into regional packages. But its hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
MLB for example - you can pay $25/month and get every game. Its a tough sell to get someone to pay $20 for the local only games. Especially when its probably on some streaming service that will suck compared to the something that like MLB which built the platform that ESPN bought/uses.
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